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Curriculum Components
The Fly Five curriculum provides students with the ability to explore and practice skills to build their social and emotional competence. Instructional materials come as print and digital components, including:
Fly Five is a kindergarten to eighth grade social and emotional learning curriculum developed on the core belief that, in order for students to be academically, socially, and behaviorally successful in, out of, and beyond school, they need to learn a set of social and emotional competencies, namely cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, and self-control (C.A.R.E.S.). The Fly Five lessons are intentionally designed to be easy to follow and implement so that teachers can place their attention on the important work of noticing a student’s academic, social, and emotional growth and progress and creating conditions for that progress to continue.
In recent years, the US has made significant advancements in embedding support for SEL at district and state levels.The movement towards SEL standards at the state level and the growing advocacy for policies to support SEL nationally create expectations for student learning. Teachers need a well-developed, standards-aligned SEL curriculum to meet state and local standards and learning expectations.
Center for Responsive Schools developed Fly Five in response to the growing need of students, families, and educators across the nation for a SEL curriculum that supports how students learn best (National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development 2019). At the center of our work is the recognition that the academic curriculum and the SEL curriculum are equally important. The growing emphasis on social and emotional learning created a need for a SEL curriculum that can be implemented with the same rigor and quality of instruction given to other core subjects and elective/exploratory courses.
As the Fly Five team designed the curriculum, we kept in mind what we’d learned as educators about implementing a curriculum. Our work was guided by seven design principles:
The Mindful Student® curriculum can be used to embed instruction in identifying and managing emotions and emotional responses throughout the day.
Teachers receive two hours of training in how to use the curriculum and 10 hours per year (30 hours over three years) of asynchronous PD intended to develop their own SEL competence and content knowledge.
The Getting Started Assessment Suite provides teachers with insights about their own social and emotional competence and empowers them to use their hopes and goals for their students’ social, emotional, and behavioral learning outcomes to make decisions about sequencing the curriculum, while supplying them with data and reports that they can use to make informative instructional decisions.
As educators prepare to allocate time in the daily schedule for SEL instruction, the amount of time available in school schedules will vary significantly. Each weekly unit contains three core lessons (60-90 minutes of instruction over three days) and two extension lessons (40-60 minutes over two days). Depending on the school context, teachers may choose to teach the core lessons and none, one, or both of the extension lessons.
Each lesson has a formative assessment to help teachers monitor student learning, inform instructional decisions, and help students identify their strengths and areas for growth.
Fly Five has a deep and intentional focus on diversity and representation. We designed Fly Five with the awareness that students’ diversity is not always reflected in their teachers. Moreover, many educational products, resources, and materials do not create teaching conditions and practices that embrace the diversity of experiences and perspectives students bring to the classroom. While no one curriculum could capture the vast diversity that exists among and between the students in schools everywhere, Fly Five was designed to be a curriculum that helps to close the gaps in representation.
The School-to-Home Connections (SHC) are designed to support parent/caregiver engagement, continue SEL learning at home, and connect parents/caregivers to what students are learning at school. The SHC unit is formatted as a newsletter with an overview of the standards, competency, and skills that are being taught in the unit. It also provides five activities that parents/caregivers can choose to incorporate at home based on their schedules. The activities vary in time and depth of engagement. Parents/caregivers can choose these activities based upon their context and time. Some activities can be completed in as few as 10 minutes, while having dinner, before bed, or even in the car. Others may take up to a full day if the parents/caregivers decide to invest that amount of time.
A global movement that fosters social and emotional competence and a culture of dignity and hope for all people
Empowering social-emotional growth in students through autonomy, belonging, and competence
Success in learning, life, work, play, relationships, and business requires a set of social and emotional competencies, namely cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, and self-control
The Fly Five curriculum provides students with the ability to explore and practice skills to build their social and emotional competence. Instructional materials come as print and digital components, including: